Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique

Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country's most politically engaged writers. These terms - recognition, commercial success, political engagement - suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas's fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.